"I Can’t Teach Nobody Nothin’"
by Dr. David Adams

Dr. David Adams is Peyton Anderson Endowed Chair of Information Technology at Macon State College. Over his academic career Dr. Adams has been active nationally and within his institutions in establishing technology-related programs and curricula and in producing instructional materials and online systems for their delivery.

During the 1980s he was principle author of the first set of national curriculum guidelines for the emerging academic discipline of “Computer Information Systems,” a still-popular academic designator and precursor of many of today’s information technology programs. He was co-founder of the Information Systems Education Conference (ISECON), which currently is the longest-running national conference for information systems educators. During this period he authored nine textbooks covering introductory concepts, computer programming, systems analysis and design, and systems development. He later helped establish the College of Business at Northern Kentucky University and served as Chair of the Information Systems department for twelve years.

Dr. Adams joined the faculty of Macon State College in 1998 enticed by the opportunity to help build a new baccalaureate program in Information Technology. He developed the Web technology track of courses, one of the two most popular majors, and has been active since in creating online materials and Web-based systems for their delivery. His set of instructional tutorials is popular with colleges, companies, and individual world-wide, and his local instructional delivery system is used by faculty across campus. He also produces locally all the textbooks for his classes from his online materials.

Dr. Adams admits to no longer having any professional or career goals nor a desire for commercial success. His work has become his recreation, he says, and his motivation is simply to learn and practice his craft and to do the best job possible of passing along this know-how to his students and to others who wish to learn. Tonight he has taken time off from his recreation to share some of his insights gained from being a student and practitioner of both his education and technology disciplines. His topic is an admission that many of us have felt but aren’t willing to admit:

“I Can’t Teach Nobody Nothin’”

Subtitled: “How I Overcame the Societal Burden of Guilt for Not Being Able to Teach Students Anything When It Wasn’t My Fault in the First Place and Became a Better Teacher Along the Way by Not Trying To”

His presentation poses questions about teacher and student expectations, about the dichotomy of traditional and new methods of instruction, and about the strengths teachers must possess and students must exhibit in order to make education work effectively.